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Safer: Longmont doesn't just seem that way -- numbers back it up

Pierrette J. Shields Longmont Times-Call

Posted:
03/24/2013 01:00:00 AM MDT

Community manager Maria Elizarraraz is working with the Longmont Police Department through its crime-free mulithousing program to make Stonehedge Place a safer environment for its residents. Monday afternoon Feb. 23, 2013.
(Lewis Geyer/Times-Call)

A decade ago, police officers would not respond alone to calls at the 114-unit apartment complex at 600 Martin St.

In fact, it was policy. The Stonehedge Place complex was just too dangerous -- known for drug deals and violence.

"Frankly, we didn't want to go there with just one officer," said Longmont Public Safety Chief Mike Butler. "Every call there was a two-officer call."

The Section 8 complex with units from one to four bedrooms has evolved in the past decade thanks to a former owner-manager who worked to crack down on the troubled housing complex.

"It has fallen off the radar now, and it is considered a very safe community," Butler said.

But the evolution did not happen in a vacuum, and it has not been the only change in the city. It serves, instead, as one example of an overall drop in both major and quality-of-life benchmark crimes, which has made Longmont a safer community anecdotally and statistically. Major crime rates in Longmont have dropped 48 percent in the past decade. Those major crimes, which are reported to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation annually, are aggravated assault, arson, burglary, homicide, forcible sex offenses, robbery, larceny theft and motor vehicle theft.

While Butler said he does not want to downplay the work of the officers at the Longmont Police Department, he said the cooperation of the community has been key to curbing problem properties, quelling gang activity and communicating crimes and potential crimes to police so they can be addressed. The city, he noted, also seems to be benefiting from a national downward trend in major crimes.

However it has happened, the local data show that Longmont has been steadily getting safer for residents in the past decade. In fact, the city's customer satisfaction survey, released in January, indicated that residents ranked crime and safety concerns only fifth among top worries for the city to address, behind the economy and jobs, stores and retail, traffic, and schools and education.

She is not scared. She is not going to tolerate criminal activity. It's possible she won't tolerate even poor housekeeping.

Elizarraraz is the community manager for the Stonehedge Place apartments at 600 Martin St. She took the post in June after the new owner, who lives in New York, hired her after warning her that she must be tough to handle the job. The previous management had done well with efforts to clean up the community and its reputation as a dangerous place to live, but she said she has work left to do and will get it done with the support of the owner and the Longmont police.

Elizarraraz said she didn't know much about the complex when she accepted the job in June, but has learned more since she started.

"I have heard police officers would not want to come out on their own," she said. "I don't blame them either."

Now there is a Longmont police substation on the property and Elizarraraz and another full-time employee work in a newly built office on the property.

Longmont Master Police Officer Sara Aerne makes regular visits while she works with Elizarraraz to get the property up to the standards for full membership in the Longmont Police Department's Crime-Free Multihousing program.

The program, which Aerne leads, certifies multiunit housing properties that have met criteria for safe physical environments -- like landscaping features that don't double as hiding places for criminal activity and proper locks on doors and windows -- and have adopted background checks and a lease addendum that leads to evictions for tenants involved in criminal activity.

In Longmont, 143 properties are enrolled in the program; 38 are fully certified.

"Longmont is about 49 percent rental," Aerne said. "We have all of the big apartment communities in the program except one."

The program is voluntary and can cost owners money to make the upgrades to meet safety standards, but Aerne said many are more than willing to make the investment. Others, she said, don't participate because of owners or managers' philosophies about keeping government and private business separate.

The program creates a formal relationship between police and property owners, who receive weekly reports about police calls to the property and sometimes information about renters who were arrested off-site, which would be a violation of the Crime-Free Multihousing lease addendum and could lead to evictions.

Longmont city employee Amber Johnson paints over graffiti on a wood fence along the railroad tracks between 15th and 17th Avenues on Tuesday morning, Feb. 19, 2013.
(Lewis Geyer/Times-Call)

Elizarraraz said she has had tenants move out under the threat of eviction and has used the lease addendum with several others to help clear out problems. She is keeping a binder of police calls to track any simmering problems. A background check for an applicant listing a felony history sat on her desk. The results meant he would not be getting a unit on the site, which maintains long waitlists for units. The applicant had felony convictions. Explanations for the convictions don't matter. She said she wants tenants with clean histories and clean apartments to feel safe at home and a felon next door would not help.

Community

Connections

Butler said that the partnerships created in the Crime-Free Multihousing program are examples of the shifts in the department's approach in the past 10 years. Other programs and police units have worked to create relationships with people in the city in an effort to strengthen relationships with law enforcement and more effectively direct police resources.

The 2006 stabbing murder of 17-year-old Martin Garcia brought Longmont's gang population and related crimes into sharper focus causing a community outcry about the gangs. The same year, Louie Lopez was hired and the Gang Response and Intervention Program was founded out of the city-run youth center. The Longmont Police Department also founded the Gang Crime Suppression Unit in the wake of the stabbing. The community-based program and police department attack the same problem from different angles. The police unit tracks city residents who are affiliated with gangs, even if they are members of non-local gangs and are the only member of that gang in the city.

Unit Officer Dan Kilian notes that the unit is aware of one motorcycle club member who just commutes through the city on his way to work. While the man doesn't cause any issues, officers know him and his affiliation in case something happens. By in large, though, most local gang members belong to one of six local gangs. The gang and crime suppression unit tracks 242 people on a regular basis -- roughly half the number reported in 2006 -- and Kilian said much of staying on top of gang crime comes from talking to members, who may share information with officers that will help quell simmering issues. The officers also keep up with gang news and activities by reading the graffiti they leave behind. Master Police Officer Justin Ownbey, a gang unit officer, recently visited locations of reported graffiti from one particular gang. The tagger signed his work.

"They are trying to claim this area as their own," he said, stopping to speak with a neighbor in the area who told the officer that property owners had removed other tags that went up at the same time as the one Ownbey was inspecting.

The tags in the neighborhood around Longmont High School may seem like simply vandalism, but Ownbey said it could mean more from a law enforcement perspective. Keeping situations from boiling over is a major part of his unit's work.

"Anything out of the norm in general is concerning because we've had a quiet winter," he said, adding that officers are going to have to start asking around to identify the tagger and try to get more information about the motives for them. "It raises some flags."

Keeping it Clean

Part of controlling gang crime escalation is keeping the graffiti-based communication among them to a minimum.

In 2006, also after the Garcia stabbing, the city hired a graffiti removal employee who removes or covers graffiti after taking digital photos of it with geotags -- mapping data attached to the photo -- so that police officers can review any messages in the graffiti and map the locations to target troubled areas. Graffiti can mean a gang is marking territory. If a rival gang crosses it out, it is read as disrespect and can escalate issues between rival members.

Amber Johnson works for the city's code enforcement and parks departments and hits the streets everyday with a truck full of paint, a power washer, and chemicals that can remove paint from all manner of surfaces. On a recent cold morning she painted over a gang-related tag on a fence along the railroad tracks in an east Longmont neighborhood.

"We try to get rid of them as soon as we can so they don't go back and forth," she said.

She notes that if her paint doesn't match the surface she tries to keep her work tidy by painting over the tags with squares or rectangles. On some surfaces, a power washer or chemicals can remove the paint in a way that makes it difficult to tell the surface was ever marred. If graffiti is left on private property she and police officers have to work with property owners to get a waiver to remove the vandalism. That can slow down the process a bit.

On city property, some places are hit more than others. She has a bike that gives her quick and easy access to underpasses and greenway areas that are favored by some vandals.

"Playgrounds get hit a lot a lot," she said.

When Ownbey headed to Centennial Park to check out a reportedly large gang tag, he found Johnson had beat him there.

"It does feel nice to go to a spot and see that you are making it prettier," Johnson said.

Studies have shown that graffiti and disorder crimes do no proliferate well in communities that immediately address or fix a problem.

Winter is a calm time for the gang unit on the whole, so many of the officers assist with other operations in that time. Recently they conducted surveillance on several shoplifting suspects who were costing local stores thousands in Longmont and neighboring communities.

Focus on dealers,

not users

The Longmont police also have a unit dedicated to drug crime. The Special Enforcement Unit has worked in recent years with federal agents and the Boulder County District Attorney's Office to infiltrate and dismantle large drug supply operations.

The investigations have netted dozens of suspects have monthslong investigations that used wiretap warrants and undercover purchases.

Longmont Detective Stephen Schulz, who recently worked with the DEA on Operation Halfway House Hunters, said the fight against drugs in the community is a tough one. Police often find that when one operation is dismantled, others fill in the market demand.

Those arrested in the recent operation were moving ounces of methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine to users in Longmont, he reported. They were the largest supplier in the area. But police had busted up two other large rings within the past two years.

Drug use, it seems, is an ever-present problem. However, it isn't measured in the federal crime benchmarks.

Calls for help

Meanwhile, overall calls for service for quality-of-life crimes in the city have slipped over the years.

In the past 10 years, calls reported to dispatchers on quality-of-life crimes -- which includes disturbances, drunk subjects, graffiti and criminal mischief, loud music, noise complaints, party complaints, shots fired, and suspicious situations -- peaked in 2007 with 7,343 calls and dipped to 5,817 in 2012.

Butler said the community as a whole has rallied in the past decade and taken more responsibility for the safety by making reports. He also credits focuses on special training and resources for domestic violence issues, drug investigations better analysis of crime data, a public-safety tax that put more officers on the streets, and tough-on-crime prosecutions from the Boulder County District Attorney's Office. And, he said, he feels the community has noticed.

"People come to me and say 'I know you don't hear this often, but I want to tell you what a great job your police department is doing,'" Butler said.

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